Among many strange incidents that I was a witness to, the episode of the Dead man walking is one of the most amusing ones. It could have ended in disaster but fortunately it ended well for all concerned.
There lived in a small village, nestled in the mountains, a notorious drunk. His wife was almost on the verge of leaving him and he was on the brink of losing his job. If his boss had not been sympathetic to his cause he would have been looking for a new job long ago. The first thing he reached out for in the morning was his bottle. Only when he had some alcohol in his system was he able to open his eyes and welcome the new day, usually, with a song.
In that village there were very few houses with telephones or any modern amenities. An alcoholic, or any addicted person, usually takes away things one after the other from his home to sell and satisfy his addiction. So this man’s, whom we will call Rohit for want of a better name, house had almost bare walls and minimum furniture. Only the kitchen had some semblance of normalcy because the wife would not let him touch anything there. Some money, that she could lay her hands on, was also kept safely there. Thankfully, the bringing up of the children was a responsibility the relatives had taken on themselves and they were doing a good job of it.
One evening – any time after 12’o clock was evening – Rohit was walking back home. That day, maybe he had had too much to drink, or it might have been the cumulative effect of the drinking over a period of time, he felt very drunk and walking seemed a herculean task. He was barely able to walk. At this time, into that village drove a car, and Rohit half drunk, not realizing what it was, instead of getting out of it’s way walked towards it. The driver expecting, as would be expected of a normal person, the man to get out of the way didn’t stop, though he did reduce the speed of the car a bit.
The result was as expected. The car hit Rohit and threw him into a little gorge next to the road. The car driver thinking he had killed the man, and being a stranger to that part of the world thought it best to keep going. He was repentant, and asked God for forgiveness, and hoped that the man was not hurt seriously. Some part of him was saying that it was not his fault, and that the man had no business coming in front of the car like that.
Be it as it may, the driver kept debating with himself as to how much of the blame of the accident was his. In the end, he decided that it was not important who was to blame but that he should have stopped after the accident and seen if the man needed any help. What he did not realize. or did not want to realize, was that he had been driving all this while and by now he was at a good distance from the scene of the accident. As soon as he decided to go back, he stopped, and looked back and realized that he was at a fair distance from the accident site. he thought now that it would be best to leave things the way they were. He would pray for the life of the man he had hit, and also ask for forgiveness from God. That was all he could do for now and that was the role of this driver in this story. In time, I am sure, he completely forgot about the man he thought he had killed.
A few children playing near by had been a witness to what had happened. They rushed to the site and when they saw Rohit lying with his face in the mud, in a most awkward position, they presumed the worst. One of them quickly shouted that Rohit was dead and people came in pouring from all directions. Deaths, like marriages, are an opportunity for the people in the village to take a break from the routine humdrum of life and get involved in something different.
….Continued
What do you think?